OpenDNS plots expansion with new funding

OpenDNS is plotting an expansion both to its global presence and to the services it offers, with the appointment of former Juniper EVP Stefan Dyckerhoff joins as a member of the OpenDNS board, bringing with him an unspecified slab of funding under his Sutter Hill Ventures fund.

OpenDNS says the funding and management expertise will be used in two ways – to build the operation's burgeoning security business, and to expand its data centre presence worldwide. Currently, it has eight data centres in the USA, three in Europe, and just two in Asia (one in Hong Kong and the other in Singapore).

Prior funding to OpenDNS has come from Minor Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners. From its beginnings as a “big cache equals fast” DNS responder with phishing detection, it now pitches itself increasingly in the security space.

It claims the centralisation of security infrastructure in Umbrella means that companies can deploy a global secured VPN “in under 30 minutes”, with the choice of a headless app pushed to users, or users can install a full app. By enforcing the use of the BPN in devices like iPhones through a config file pushed to the device, OpenDNS believes it offers better mobile enterprise security than solutions based on solutions pushed from the enterprise IT department. ®